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Bella's public facing email address (eor@eor.eor; many of the Bells are following similar protocols to Stella's, for web presence, and in Origin the relevant empire is called the Empire of Rings, after Saturn's feature) gets a lot of mail. Jane used to help with it; without Jane, there is still extremely smart filtering going on, and a program no one has noticed at work yet auto-responds to almost everything with canned but tweakable responses and links to the imperial website.
This still leaves a lot of emails every day she has to deal with herself, although some of them allow her to make gentle adjustments to Jane's program to handle future inquiries of the same kind. The number goes up over time. Slipstick's still on the lookout for a suitable secretary type person to help out. Until then, Bella leans on super-speed.
She has had to address the rumors about being able to raise the dead. It's a frustrating, narrow line to walk, between lying, explaining too much, and getting everyone's hopes up. Currently the FAQ has a section that looks like this:
Can you raise the dead?
Eventually, I'd like to be able to do that for everyone's departed loved ones. I'm working on it as fast as I can, but today all I can deploy are public health measures and, on a smaller scale, immortality, for people who are currently alive.
I heard you were dead and brought yourself back to life / I heard someone else was dead and you brought them back to life!
This is an exaggeration. I'm immortal; if I suffer lethal damage, the thing I do is called 'torching', not 'dying'. The same is true of other people who I've made able to torch.
I want to be able to torch.
There's a waiting list, but this is something I can do. Just fill out the form and my staff will process your application; if everything checks out the current wait time for getting into a torching batch is about four months.
I don't want to torch, but I want to stop aging.
This is also available, but the waiting list is longer; apply here.
Are you sure you can't raise the dead?
I really, really wish I could do that for everyone who asks. I maintain a waiting list of people whose resurrection has been particularly requested so that as soon as I have this capability I'll know who to use it for first.
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bellfounding
tearingup
He starts keeping count of some things after Amariah, then gives up again after Cam.
"So... species things, magic things, some plain old nicknames, one boy... what are you going to do if you find another boy? Cam the Second?"
"So... species things, magic things, some plain old nicknames, one boy... what are you going to do if you find another boy? Cam the Second?"
bellfounding
"If he's named Campbell and goes by Cam, I suppose they'll have to work something else out, yeah. He might not be named Campbell, though - the girls don't all match. It's usually Isabella, but there's a Bell and a Belle and an Isibel. The 'bel' part is the only guaranteed part."
tearingup
"...The only other boy's name with a 'bel' in it that springs to mind is 'Cymbeline'," laughs Ripper.
bellfounding
"For all we know we'll find one of those," shrugs Bella. "But there's also 'Abel', and non-English names, and non-Earthly names for that matter."
tearingup
"Belial," he suggests, now that he's thinking about it. "Belshazzar. Béla - or does the pronunciation matter? Sibelius? Not a first name, but half the time neither is Campbell."
bellfounding
"Pronunciation has some wiggle room. Shell Bell and Aegis are native English speakers but have noticeable accents relative to standard because they're from the future; Rose and Glass and Sarion and Angela didn't originally speak English at all - although Rose's language is mutually intelligible with regular French and Angela's culture uses a lot of Biblical names - and the correct pronunciations of their full names are slightly affected by that."
tearingup
"'Because they're from the future', right, I love how that's a sensible explanation now," he giggles.
bellfounding
"Not the same future. Shell Bell grew up in a flooded dystopia where the totalitarian government had all the tech, Aegis grew up in space to learn to fight aliens," giggles Bella. "Angela's also from the future, but by a lot more, except her ancestors plunked down on this other planet, destroyed most of their technology and lied to their kids about the rest. She hasn't left the planet to check out the rest of civilization yet; she's trying to take it slow so she doesn't shock her population too badly, since the complete revelation involves telling them that God doesn't exist except in the form of a spaceship that addresses her as 'Captain'."
tearingup
"...So Angela is from the future that tried to be the past," Ripper interprets. "And failed."
bellfounding
"Yeah, apparently they colonized the planet from someplace that had a lot of wars and thought it was technology's fault. There's supposed to be one person who knows about the god and the technology and stuff at any given time, so they can go up and fix the ship, if it needs it."
bellfounding
"It totally is, the chain was broken not long before Angela was born and the microphones that detect the weather-control songs weren't working," snorts Bella, "and another angel figured out what was wrong and fixed it. She's the one who told Angela, because - do you want this whole story or just the overview?"
tearingup
"Let's have the story," he decides. "Does this palace have anywhere to sit down while I hear it?"
bellfounding
"Yeah, sure," she says, and she leads him through the blue garden into the tower, where there is assorted seating upholstered in navy blue leather. She flops onto a couch. "So this other angel's name is Alleluia. The Archangel - the spaceship picks those, they serve twenty years, they are supposed to co-rule with a spouse the spaceship picks out for them - broke her wing, and Alleluia was picked to fill out the rest of her term; Archangels have to be able to fly so they can get near enough the microphones to sing prayers for weather and seeds and medicine to fall from the sky. The microphones were breaking, but the most important oracular site - read: ancient computer terminal - was standing unused, previous oracle died without picking a successor. So the spaceship was all, 'send help', but no one was reading the screen.
"Alleluia did some Archangeling, could not find her intended angelico because his tracking device all the babies on this world get implanted in their arms at birth was broken, and wound up teaching herself the oracular language and going to the empty oracle site and going up and replacing a circuit board. So then it worked again. Also her intended angelico found out what she was doing, went to the ship and got identified as such, and swiped some batteries from the ship, which he was able to use to fix the previous Archangel's broken wing well enough for her to fly. Alleluia became the oracle in the empty oracular site, all was well.
"Then, though, Angela finds us, and she takes some magic - she had misgivings about it, she was really religious, but she actually asked Alleluia to ask Jovah, that's the god's name, if magic was forbidden, and he said no. So she took it, and started doing covert miracles, and then there was this deformed baby born in her angel hold. So she swipes him and flies up where no one can see her, and asks Jovah to fix it, and of course he doesn't, because he's a spaceship, so she does it with magic and flies back down and tells everyone that Jovah did it - but Alleluia knew she was lying. So she confronted her and they swapped secrets, because Angela of course wanted to know how Alleluia could have figured out she was lying. Oh, and meanwhile, Angela had also asked who would be her angelico if she were ever named Archangel, and her Joker Micaiah who she'd already met was the answer, and so by the time she learned that Jovah was just a spaceship she was already married and knocked up. Bit of a rough day. They're okay though, they had four little cherubs last time I saw them."
"Alleluia did some Archangeling, could not find her intended angelico because his tracking device all the babies on this world get implanted in their arms at birth was broken, and wound up teaching herself the oracular language and going to the empty oracle site and going up and replacing a circuit board. So then it worked again. Also her intended angelico found out what she was doing, went to the ship and got identified as such, and swiped some batteries from the ship, which he was able to use to fix the previous Archangel's broken wing well enough for her to fly. Alleluia became the oracle in the empty oracular site, all was well.
"Then, though, Angela finds us, and she takes some magic - she had misgivings about it, she was really religious, but she actually asked Alleluia to ask Jovah, that's the god's name, if magic was forbidden, and he said no. So she took it, and started doing covert miracles, and then there was this deformed baby born in her angel hold. So she swipes him and flies up where no one can see her, and asks Jovah to fix it, and of course he doesn't, because he's a spaceship, so she does it with magic and flies back down and tells everyone that Jovah did it - but Alleluia knew she was lying. So she confronted her and they swapped secrets, because Angela of course wanted to know how Alleluia could have figured out she was lying. Oh, and meanwhile, Angela had also asked who would be her angelico if she were ever named Archangel, and her Joker Micaiah who she'd already met was the answer, and so by the time she learned that Jovah was just a spaceship she was already married and knocked up. Bit of a rough day. They're okay though, they had four little cherubs last time I saw them."
tearingup
"Little cherubs meaning baby angels? The Joker with children, now there's a terrifying thought," laughs Ripper.
bellfounding
"Little angels, yeah, oldest one was ten last I saw her. Micaiah is definitely the sweetest Joker, though. Except literally in which case it's Jellybean. All the Joker kids I know about are doing fine - there's Angela's four, Rose's two who match Angela's eldest, and then the ones the Joker from here had with his vampire boyfriend."
bellfounding
"Yeah, he's from Cam's world, and he used wizarding to make himself taste like candy, and now he has an enchanter's aura that does it much more effectively. I haven't sampled him, but it's easy to tell even from a distance even if it weren't for the other Jokers always mentioning it."
tearingup
"You know, I don't even know what the Joker looks like under all that makeup," he says musingly.
bellfounding
"Want to see illusions of one or more of the deck? Since I'm assuming you'd let me know if you wanted an introduction to one of the ones here."
bellfounding
Since he didn't specify, she just conjures up all the known Jokers, including a miniature Ansharil with an equally illusory note stating that he is not to scale. She includes nametags in the conjuration. Also, Aianon appears wearing pants.
tearingup
"He doesn't look unusually sweet," says Ripper, examining Jellybean's illusion. "Cheerful, though."